Libraries Win, Emergency Management Loses in Budget

Editor's Note: This story requires a correction. Because of a wrinkle in how the city budgets for libraries, the current budget doesn't reflect all the money the systems had to spend in fiscal 2014. A prepayment in 2013 of funds for this year means that there's no significant increase in money going to the library systems in 2015. For more on the error, which we regret, click here.

The city's libraries enjoy some of the biggest increases in Mayor de Blasio's executive budget. Compared to the current spending plan, the departments of emergency management, small business services and investigation all would see substantial cuts if the numbers in the plan presented Thursday were adopted by the City Council in June.

New York's budget is enormous—the city's $20.6 billion education budget in fiscal 2015, for instance, would be larger than the entire budgets of 15 states. What's more, the budget embodies not just local decisions, but state and federal policy as well. And it evolves over the year, sometimes dramatically.

So it's risky to look at any set of numbers and conclude that they tell the story of what's really going on in the spending plan.

But the broadest trends, like the 6 percent increase the mayor proposes over last year's adopted budget or the 0.2 percent growth between the current modified budget and de Blasio's 2015 spending plan, don't capture the ups and downs of individual departments that every budget must prescribe.

With that in mind, here's what a quick comparison of the mayor's executive budget and the fiscal year 2014 modified budget reveals:

The Office of Emergency Management sees the largest funding decrease in percentage terms: 84 percent, from $60 million to less than $10 million, largely because a lot of federal grants the agency received this year aren't budgeted for next year.

In dollar terms, the Department of Environmental Protection suffers the largest cut—a $421 million trim to its $1.2 billion budget.

The four library budget lines—research libraries, the New York Public Library (which serves Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island), Brooklyn Public Library and Queens Public Library would see, by percentage, the highest increases over current spending. All four budgets increase by 22 percent or more.

City schools are slated for a $913 million boost, the largest any department would see in dollar terms.